


aperture

by deadseasalt



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Kageyama is still a dumbass, M/M, Non-Volleyball Player Kageyama, Oikawa is still an idiot, Photography AU!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-04-21 02:46:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22029778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadseasalt/pseuds/deadseasalt
Summary: Film Photography AU!There was always so much to see in Oikawa-san’s photos. Always so much to learn. When he’d shown Oikawa-san the prints for the first time, he had felt overwhelmingly shy. He felt the same way now. Shy and exposed. Kageyama held his breath.“They're fine,” Oikawa-san said, his voice stiff.
Relationships: Kageyama Tobio/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 15
Kudos: 237





	aperture

**Author's Note:**

> it's that oikage time of the year again! it is also that time of year where i indulge myself by writing my hobbies into fic. may this one-shot provide you warm and fuzzy feelings to beat the cold winter blues. happy new year, everyone!

The doorbell to the photography shop was out of order, so Kageyama didn’t realize someone had come in until he felt the cold breeze nipping at his calves.

The door clicked shut, and they stared at each other.

Then the corner of Oikawa-san’s mouth curled up. “Tobio-chan. How’s my little sick genius apprentice doing?”

“I’m not an apprentice.”

Oikawa-san didn’t stop smirking, even though his voice took on a whingey tone. “Couldn’t you have answered my question like a normal person? Anyone else would have just said, ‘fine.’”

“I’m not – ” Kageyama cut himself off. He had taken the bait.

Oikawa-san’s smirk widened. Kageyama scowled, angry at himself. “What do you want?”

“What does it look like I want? Why else would a shop’s patron patronise the shop?”

Kageyama rolled his eyes. The grandfather clock in the corner of the shop ticked towards five-thirty. This time in the summer, Mr. Miyuki’s shop would be flooded with sunlight, and Aoba Castle would be gleaming gold if Kageyama were to look out of the window. But winters were cold in Miyagi, and the days were short, and Kageyama spent a good part of his days working in darkness, under lamplight. Lamplight that now cast Oikawa-san’s face into sharp relief.

Oikawa-san walked up to the counter. He dropped his backpack onto the floor and bent down to rummage through it. There was still snow in his hair, though it was melting. The snow would undo all the hairgel magic soon, Kageyama mused. But for now, Oikawa-san’s hair held itself in place.

“This is an Ilford Delta 3200.” Oikawa-san set a roll of film on the counter, the white label on the cartridge stood stark against the soft brown of the countertop hardwood. “Have you worked with it before?”

“No,” Kageyama said. His heart was thrumming. He reached out and took the Ilford and laid it out on his palm.

Oikawa-san narrowed his eyes. “Are you _weighing_ it?”

Kageyama put the Ilford down quickly. “No.”

Oikawa-san looked at him for a moment longer, his expression unreadable. Then he said, “Micchan will know what to do with it.”

Kageyama took the Ilford into his hand again. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that Oikawa-san didn’t want Mr. Miyuki to develop his film. He wanted Kageyama. Otherwise he would have just come in when Mr. Miyuki was managing the counter, which was most days. And he would have asked Mr. Miyuki, and only Mr. Miyuki, to develop the photos. Mr. Miyuki would have agreed. Kageyama knew, and Oikawa-san knew, that Mr. Miyuki had a soft spot for Oikawa-san and would have developed the photos himself if Oikawa-san had asked. After all, Oikawa-san had apparently been Mr. Miyuki’s best employee for three years running before Kageyama had come into the picture.

Oikawa-san never asked Mr. Miyuki though, and Kageyama’s heart skipped a beat as he took out a paper bag from one of the drawers. He wrote the name “Oikawa Tooru” on the bag and slipped the roll of film into it. “I’m sure Mr. Miyuki would know what to do with it,” he said. “Your photos will be ready for you in a week.”

“Hmmm.”

“Is there something else I can help you with?”

“Maybe.”

Kageyama sighed. He went into the back room and retrieved Oikawa-san’s photos from last week. The back room was slightly colder. When he went back to the front, the warmth surprised him.

Oikawa-san was humming a J-pop song that had been playing on the radio for the last few weeks. He was horribly off-key. And loud. And distracting. Kageyama smiled. It was like this the first time they met, too, in the summer. Oikawa-san had hummed and flitted around while he waited for Kageyama to finish fixing the broken down fan and pay him attention. In the weeks after, whenever he was in the shop, Oikawa-san would dance around Kageyama, picking up old cameras to inspect them, laughing with Mr. Miyuki, tapping his foot as he waited for Kageyama to bring him his pictures. Kageyama would learn that Oikawa-san was never still.

Oikawa-san was never still in the shop, but Kageyama knew that sometimes, he must be. There was this one picture Kageyama had developed for him. It was of a crow taking flight, its body gleaming black in the streetlights, its beak half open for a caw. Perhaps it was the contradiction between the heavy darkness of the crow’s body and the lightness of flight, but for some reason, the picture really touched Kageyama. And he knew that to take such pictures of birds, Oikawa-san must have been very still, silent, and steady.

Oikawa-san stopped humming when he saw Kageyama. “Took you long enough.”

“I’ve only been gone for a minute.”

“I’ve only got a minute.”

“Okay.” Kageyama knew Oikawa-san would spend at least another five minutes looking at the photos, trying to nitpick everything Kageyama had done, and Kageyama would spend those five minutes hanging on to Oikawa-san’s every word.

“Well?” Oikawa-san raised his eyebrows. “Let’s see them then.”

He took the envelope from Kageyama and reached in. Laid the photos one by one on the counter with careful fingers, taking his time. These were the photos Kageyama had developed right after he’d come back from sick leave. They were beautiful.

Pictures of Tokyo in the fall. Cloud darkened residential streets, a balding oak shielding a girl from the wind. The wind whispering. Boys laughing. Another singular boy with a deep side parting in his hair frowning. These were all volleyball players, with pads on their knees and tape on their fingers. Kageyama didn’t know a lot about volleyball, but Hinata had told him, with an envious look on his face, that the national training camps happened in Tokyo in autumn.

Oikawa-san must have gone. Kageyama knew, from his pictures in the summer, that he played for Aoba Johsai. As captain, setter. The pictures from the summer had been drenched in colour, serrated with lines: the white borders of the court framing the thundering of feet, the top of the net witnessing a boy leaping past it in preparation of a spike, the body of another player, pulled tight in an acute angle against the floor, diving, reaching to save the ball. There had been one portrait of Oikawa-san’s best friend, the dark one who’d come in with Oikawa-san one day in November, who had looked from Oikawa-san to Kageyama and back again, and laughed. In Oikawa-san’s photo, his head was bowed, one hand raised to wipe away the sweat. The volleyball court behind him was dark and blurred, but the guy’s profile cut through the shadows like a blade of light.

There had been other pictures too: an old woman standing on the vanishing point of some railroad tracks. The converging tracks lent her a spotlight despite being on the brink of disappearing, and strands of her hair were blown back to dance with the wind. To the sides, rows of sunflowers kissed the edge of the tracks yellow and yellow, even though the photograph was printed only in shades of grey. There had been another one of two people traversing a crosswalk at night, their shadows stretching out, away from the headlight beams of cars and fading into the bright stripes of the crossing. When Kageyama first saw those pictures, he had been unable to keep his eyes from the subjects of the photos. He had wanted to peer closer, to take a look at their faces, to ask them their names.

He had tried to emphasise those lines, those colours when he developed the photos, trying once, twice, three times to get it right. On Kageyama’s first day, Mr. Miyuki had told him that, just like an editor can make something different emerge out of another person's writing, the person exposing the negative can also change a photograph by adjusting the aperture, exposure time, and contrast. Together, the photographer and exposer can produce a photo neither of them could have created without the other. Kageyama had tried to expose Oikawa-san’s negatives in the most colourful way.

Oikawa-san picked up a photo and held it up to the light. It was one that Kageyama had wasted four pieces of paper on, the one that he’d redone so many times that the acrid tang of the developer had clogged his nose, that the sting of the stopper had made a burn on his skin. It was a picture of a scene in the Tsukiji fish market, the market that was about to close. In the picture, a fish vendor leans off screen. He’s a blur, in motion, in habitual movement. But his smile was sharp, and it rendered the photograph an exercise of precision in the midst of fleetingness. It was the first time Oikawa-san had played with contrast of ephemerality and familiarity, and Kageyama had tried so hard to capture it, along with the persistent smell of fish in the background, the rattling of carts on the cobblestones slick with rain.

There was always so much to see in Oikawa-san’s photos. Always so much to learn. When he’d shown Oikawa-san the prints for the first time, he had felt overwhelmingly shy. He felt the same way now. Shy and exposed. Kageyama held his breath.

“They're fine,” Oikawa-san said, his voice stiff.

“How did you do it?” Kageyama asked, his heart thundering in his chest. He should stop talking now, but he continued, the words tumbling out of his mouth: “Your lines in these are so great. They really make the subjects of your photos look super in focus. But then there’s this softness, too. And the lighting is always just right. This one really took my breath away.”

He reached out to point to the photograph in question, just as the same time Oikawa-san put the Tsukiji picture back down. Their hands brushed.

They stared at each other. Kageyama was so aware of Oikawa-san’s touch. His skin was soft, and Kageyama was sure, now, that Oikawa-san moisturised. That was one question answered, but there were still so many things Kageyama wanted to ask him. Things like _what are you trying to ask of me? Can I take a photo of you? Can you teach me?_

One beat of the heart, then two. And then Oikawa-moved away. He didn’t have to. Kageyama could keep touching Oikawa-san’s hand all day. But oh. Oh. Oikawa-san was coming around the counter, and he was opening another drawer, and he was pulling out an envelope identical to the one Kageyama had just given him. Well, almost. This one had Kageyama’s name written on it.

Kageyama Tobio. Not Tobio-kun. Not Tobio-chan.

Oikawa-san cleared his throat. “Micchan asked me to help while you were out with the flu. I didn’t need training, and it’s extra cash for me.”

“Right,” Kageyama said, his breath catching in his throat.

“So, I developed your photos for you,” Oikawa-san said, redundantly. He raised his chin.

And Kageyama was struck with the image of Oikawa-san sitting where Kageyama usually sat, cutting up Kageyama’s negatives for him, finding the focus in Kageyama’s photos, counting the number of exposures he’d need. The careful placement of his fingers as he shifted the photo frame to get Kageyama’s picture right, the delicate fluttering of his wrists under the light as he waved the shadows in.

It felt incredibly intimate.

He could barely look at Oikawa-san when he opened the envelope, and his hands were trembling as he took out the prints and turned them over.

“I tried to – ” Oikawa-san started, then stopped. Out of the corner of his eye, Kageyama saw him shaking his head. “Nevermind.”

These were the photos that Kageyama had taken using Mr. Miyuki’s tiny Canonet just before Christmas. It had been a particularly cold week, a rain had swept across Miyagi, and then a deep freeze. It had left the roads encased in black ice. Looking at the photos now, however, Kageyama felt suffused with warmth. He could taste the toastiness of the tea in his mother’s hands, the smell of pork buns wafting out of Sakanoshita late Christmas Eve, the sound of Hinata and Tsukishima yelling at each other as they slipped on the pavement on their way to school. Yachi’s smile after an evening in downtown Sendai. And finally, a picture of Kageyama himself, one Yamaguchi had taken the day they had all gone down to the Hirose River. Yamaguchi had set the shutter speed too low that day, left the aperture too wide. It would have been an unsalvageable photo.

But Kageyama in the photo was soft, blending in with his surroundings but never overshadowed by them. Somehow, Oikawa-san had managed to make each frond of the river reeds distinguishable from one another, had given the river enough shadow so that instead a blurred-out rush, it was a slow-moving stream.

He had also made out the exact shade of Kageyama’s eyes.

“I – ” Kageyama did not know why just looking at his own portrait made it so hard for him to speak. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”

He looked up, and Oikawa-san’s face was caught in surprise. The furrows of his brow smoothed out, his eyes wide, his jaw slack. In this moment he was completely still, completely open, and strangely vulnerable.

He was a perfect photograph.

Then his expression shuttered. He stuttered out some words, threw down some money, and left the shop before Kageyama had time to react.

The cold breeze curled around Kageyama’s ankles. The image of Oikawa-san curled around his memory. He picked of the envelope containing the Ilford and weighed it on his palm again. It felt hefty, full of promise.

Kageyama carried it to the back room and began to work.


End file.
